Day 33

5.04: First a word from our sponsor. Therebeforelight is back, thanks to the generosity of Tom Catchesides who, Warren Buffet-like, has thrown his support behind the cause by buying a computer. One that works too. From now on, Therebeforelight’s full name will be “Therebeforelight (in association with Tom Catchesides)” but only in people’s hearts; no one will actually call it that.

Right, so what did I miss? There was an earthquake. Someone’s Dad told the CIA, his son might blow up a plane, but it was Christmas, so the spooks decided to let him have his fun, “Nah, what harm can he do?” Then the whole of Barack Obama’s presidency was destroyed when he lost an election to one of the Chippendales. Obama I’m told now lives in a car. The recession ended everywhere except Stoke and Burnley, and Stoke City responded by trying to sign an interplanetarily expensive Dutchman from a gang of billionaire Spanish spacecats. But failed. On telly, there seem to have been a lot of trouser-led programmes about twirling in front of a trestle table lined-up with charmless, po-faced magistrates of dance and, while we were all distracted by that, the planet forgot that no-one’s driving Nigeria. Meanwhile, in a dusty cupboard in Westminster, some diligent civil servants have been looking into whether invading Iraq might have been “A Bad Thing,” doing battle against overwhelming legal evidence in their favour. Gamely, Tony Blair has offered to put right his wrong by generating enough power to prop up Basra’s faltering grid using only the glint in his eye.

My house is now a goddam fortress. Bars gird the windows, and bolts fortify the doors. I’ve introduced iris scanning and rectal probing on entry (don’t make my mistake and go into the machine backwards). Added to which, I’ve brutalised a couple of foxes, who now prowl about outside, savaging intruders with their penknife-whittled claws and sawn-off teeth. Abandon hope all ye who enter here.

6.54: Not really a barnstorming comeback, like that of Mali against Angola. In fact not really a comeback at all, since I’ve been notionally doing this undercover for the last couple of weeks. But taking stock of where we’re up to this morning, I discovered that somehow I’ve managed to write the same chapter twice. Chapter 13 trots along all terribly jolly, but then the same thing crops up again in chapter 16. Which is confusing, and plays merry hell with the structure of the thing. What I can’t work out is whether it’s chapter 13 or chapter 16 that’s the wrong one, and, whichever it is, what’s missing that ought to be in its place. Brutal use of the delete key is going to be called for, but it’s a bit like randomly trampling one or other of your pet rabbits, hoping blindly you get the one with myxomatosis.